When I was 10, I was introduced to the life of Helen Keller. In the branches of our
favorite tree, my best friend Carla read the story of Helen Keller to me, and together we learned
the manual alphabet from the pictures at the back of the book. It would serve as our secret
code.

While I marveled at the accomplishments of Helen Keller, I felt no connection with her.
She, after all, was remarkable and “handicapped.” Although I shared one of her significant
disabilities, blindness, I didn't want to be linked to her: I just wanted to be a regular
person.

Last week, while visiting a college roommate who lives near Ann Arbor, Mich., I reveled for an
afternoon at the public library there in a traveling exhibit entitled “Child in a Strange Country.”&
amp; amp; amp; #160; Assembled by the American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville, Ky., the
exhibit is available to libraries and museums nationwide and features an in-depth look at education
for the blind and visually impaired over the centuries. Examples of tactile depictions used
to teach science and mathematics to blind children throughout the world are on display, as well as
tools and techniques used by Keller herself. The exhibit is almost fully accessible — with
extensive audio clips, braille reproductions of printed texts and hands-on 3D displays.

Mark Twain, one of Helen Keller's many celebrated friends, predicted that her name would still
be known a thousand years after her death. Certainly, 33 years later, her name remains a
well-known icon of triumph over adversity and the capabilities of a person with severe
disabilities.

Born in Alabama in 1880, Helen Keller lost both sight and hearing at 18 months of age.
Wild and unruly, without language, she was considered by many to be without intelligence until her
famous teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy, came to the family a few months before Helen's 7th
birthday. For the next 80 years, Helen Keller would continue learning, expanding boundaries,
amazing the world.

She met all the presidents from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon Johnson, and had a warm
correspondence with both Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt. She was the first American both
deaf and blind to complete college when she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe in 1904. Her
first book was published just one year later:
The Story of My Life, which has been translated into 50 languages.

But Helen Keller was much more complex than an angelic deaf-blind wonder who earned a college
degree and met presidents and kings. In her frequent contributions to newspapers and
magazines, she wrote not only about blindness but also about social issues, world peace, women's
rights and social conditions.

“We vote? What does that mean?” she wrote in a 1911 letter. “It means that we choose
between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and
Tweedledee!”

In 1909, she joined the Socialist party. Her name was on lists monitored by the FBI.
She wrote and spoke out against the atrocities being committed against German Jews in the early
1930s, against racism in America all her adult life, and in support of women, children and people
with disabilities. She was beautiful. She drank martinis. In 1916, she came close
to being married. And yet, as Dorothy Herman points out in
Helen Keller, A Life, her physical beauty was rarely noted.

“The chief handicap of the blind is not blindness, but the attitude of seeing-people towards
them,” she said in a 1925 speech. Similarly, as fund raiser and ambassador for the American
Foundation for the Blind, she wrote in a letter to Will Rogers in 1930, “the blind suffer from the
wrong attitude of the world towards them more than from blindness.”

Any person with a disability of any kind might well say exactly the same thing today.

Helen Keller was funny and brilliant and generous. Although she had never been out of the
United States until age 50, she ultimately visited 35 countries on five continents to speak on
behalf of the blind and disabled and to try to improve conditions for others less fortunate than
she was. In 1943, she began touring the military hospitals around the country, visiting
soldiers who had become blind, deaf or disabled to offer courage and inspiration. She called
those visits “the crowning experience of my life.”

While raising money to purchase radios and early phonograph machines called Talking Book players
to bring news, entertainment and literature to the blind of all classes, Helen Keller wrote
tirelessly to politicians, movie stars and other celebrities for help. She sometimes
commented on how much she enjoyed the radio. But she was deaf! we say.

That is perhaps the greatest reason why we should always celebrate her life — whether we have
disabilities or not.

She had three senses in lieu of the customary five, and it might be argued that her deep
appreciation of the world was the result of
more sensory input rather than less. She who was perceived as having great
limitations accepted no boundaries for her love of life and exploration of the world. Mark
Twain was probably right: We will know her name for at least a thousand years. Now that I
know her better, I hope the name will conjure images of a woman of passion and laughter and drive,
not just a saintly icon of otherness. In fact, she was all of it.

June 27 is Helen Keller’s birthday.

It is clear to me that Helen Keller wanted exactly the same thing as the 10-year-old me learning
about her: to be treated like everyone else and to live this life completely.

“Child in a Strange Country” is at the Ann Arbor Library until June 30. To learn more,
visit: